Most of the company’s revenue now comes from the registrar part of the business, though the registry division is the more profitable.

CentralNic said today that “subscription products” are now roughly 90% of total revenue.

The company expects to save £1 million ($1.3 million) this year by migrating its old registrars over to the KeyDrive platform and migrating its new registries onto the CentralNic platform.

It has also appointed KeyDrive’s former CFO as CentralNic CFO, replacing Don Baladasan. Michael Riedl has also joined the board of directors, while Baladasan remains on the board as group managing director.

XYZ.com has quietly unveiled its launch plan for its recently acquired gTLD, .monster.

General availability, with no eligibility requirements, is due to begin April 1.

The 30-day sunrise period is due to begin in just a couple of weeks — February 18.

.monster was acquired late last year from recruitment web site Monster.com, which had intended to operate it as a dot-brand, for an undisclosed sum.

Before the acquisition closed, Monster and ICANN amended the registry contract to cut the special dot-brand terms that would have removed the need for a sunrise period and would have prevented the domain being sold to regular registrants.

XYZ also intends to run a week-long Early Access Period — where premium prices apply — starting March 21.

I quite like the idea of .monster as an open gTLD.

While it’s certainly not going to perform as well volume-wise as .xyz, say, I can see it fitting nicely into the “quirky” niche occupied currently but the likes of Donuts’ .guru and .ninja — not really viable as standalone TLDs, but decent enough as part of a portfolio.

The company is pitching the TLD as “a domain for creative thinkers, masters of their craft, and modern-day renegades.”

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced yesterday that the following Afilias-owned TLDs now have its official seal of approval: .archi, .bio, .black, .blue, .green, .lotto, .organic, .pet, .pink, .poker, .promo, .ski, .vote, .voto and .移动 (xn--6frz82g, means “mobile”),

Also approved are .asia and .网站 (.xn--5tzm5g means “website”), which to the best of my knowledge are not owned by Afilias but are quite closely managed by it.

All 17 were approved via the same Shanghai-based Afilias subsidiary, due to MIIT’s local presence requirements.

Chinese approval means Chinese registrants using Chinese registrars will be permitted to have their names resolve in China, subject to the country’s rather stringent censorship practices.

It’s the first batch of Afilias names to get the nod since April 2017, when .info, .pro and .mobi were approved.